Consuming Religion by Kathryn Lofton (review)

With her most recent volume, Consuming Religion, Kathryn Lofton has made an immensely significant contribution to the multidisciplinary field of post-secular studies. While figures like Tracy Fessenden, John McClure, and Mark C. Taylor have ably refuted the long-held secularization thesis through their examinations of politics, literature, and the fine arts, Lofton further undermines visions of an inherently disenchanted modernity by analyzing the religious content of commerce and popular culture. Lofton encourages scholars to realign the traditional perspective of religious studies by turning their attention to places and relations that have previously been disregarded as the mere constituents of secular mass culture. With an admirable incisiveness, Lofton shows that seemingly secular institutions, practices, and products thought to be wholly divorced from the locales, texts, and rituals of mainstream religion have been surreptitiously sacralized and inscribed with religious import. By doing so, she reveals that modern American culture is far from disenchanted, but rather, is as saturated and conditioned by the sacred as it ever was. She writes that, given the existent wealth of "anthropological, demographic, and textual evidence…it cannot be useful to say that religion has diminished or been eradicated from the range of human expression. Rather, it seems more useful to specify how religion forms itself in the modern era, especially as it is articulated outside institutionalized forms of religious ideation and practice" (125). To accomplish this, rather than remain mired in the study of these institutionalized forms, Lofton returns to some of the fundamental questions of religious studies, such as, what is religion? What is it for? What does it do? Following Durkheim, Lofton writes that "religion is the primary social form by which our socialization takes place," it "provides social control, cohesion, and purpose for people," and "it reinforces the morals and social norms held collectively by all within society" (18). Put another way, Lofton argues that religion consists of the rituals and norms of thought and practice—which are always material and never exclusively abstract—that maintain social cohesion and reproduce a given social formation and its power relations. Through a rigorous examination of a variety of scholarly and popular archives, she finds that the primary sources of social cohesion, control, ritual, and reproduction in modern America are located in our economic culture. This leads Lofton to the primary thesis of her book, to a position that, though seemingly simple, has been taken by remarkably few scholars of American religion and culture, namely that "religion and economics are inextricable in the United States, with one producing the other" (7). In modern America, there is a "persistent commiseration between religion and economy" where the spheres work in concert and are mutually supportive (8). As such, we can observe attributes of each sphere in the other. Just as institutional religion has assumed the trappings of American commerce, "consumer life is itself a religious enterprise," as is corporate culture (6). Because "the marketplace [is] the primary archive of religion" in modern America, rather than the institutions and texts of organized religion, we must begin to "thin[k] about religion through the popular" (6, 5). Recalibrating her approach in this way, Lofton covers four major developments in her wide-ranging book: (1) how the act of consumption became religious, (2) how religion adopted commercial traits, (3) how business became religious, and (4) the religious aspects of celebrity culture.

The form of the book consists of eleven chapters that are sorted into five thematic sections. The first section, "Practicing Commodity," begins with a chapter on binge watching and the rise of fundamentalism. The second chapter is one of the strongest in the volume. Here, Lofton offers a religious history of the office cubicle, demonstrating that this ubiquitous and seemingly secular commercial object is particularly potent for the study of religion in modern America. It is in this chapter that Lofton first forwards a claim that she will expand upon at greater length later in the book, namely, that "Corporation is just another word for sect" (58...